Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
distinguished between legitimate informal enterprises, and illegitimate
service and transfer activities such as smuggling, prostitution and
petty theft. In the twenty-first century, it is difficult to ignore the grow-
ing incidence of
criminal operators
engaged in drug smuggling, theft,
extortion, forced labour, human smuggling and prostitution, who are
also likely to invest in the informal sector. Recent concern over the
rapid growth of the human trafficking industry, which the UN esti-
mates is worth £16 billion globally, fuels a supply of forced - mainly
female - labour to the sex trade and industrial sweatshops (Shelley,
2007). Hence, there are tenuous boundaries between the exploitation of
women and children in informal outworking businesses and global traf-
ficking. Indeed, the failure of governments and agencies to protect the
world's most vulnerable workers has opened up new spaces of exploita-
tion that make it difficult to disconnect the informal sector from crimi-
nal networks in forced and trafficked labour.
Assisting Informal Workers in Old and
New Spaces of the Informal Economy
140
New worker-oriented and gendered definitions of the informal sector,
which encompass unregulated waged, home-based and even forced or
trafficked labour, have reawakened an interest in the informal economy
from a decent work and social justice perspective. Research suggests
that poverty and vulnerability for many workers, particularly women,
are more likely to be defined by the nature of their employment rela-
tionships rather than whether their work is situated in the informal or
formal sectors of the economy per se. While traditional policies aimed
at supporting the informal sector have focused on supporting entrepre-
neurs through the provision of micro-credit, training and small busi-
ness development, recent policy analysis focuses on two interlinked
objectives: the development of an appropriate regulatory framework
which focuses on social protection for informal workers and a series of
complementary development policies that include access to services,
assets and entitlements in order to reduce intergenerational poverty.
As will be discussed in Chapter 3.4, new technologies and the Internet
can play a key role in mobilizing support for exploited workers in the
global economy.
